Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 7575
using man won't take you back to the prompt
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:53 EDT
In a terminal session, using man i.e. [root@localhost /root]# man semop You get the man page to look at, and space bar will take you down a page at a time like normal. But when you get to the end you can't get your prompt back by hitting enter or space. It just beeps. Then if you crtl-Z you get the prompt back, but you will have two orphaned processes out there from your man command. i.e. [root@localhost /root]# ps -ef|grep man now you have to manually kill them to remove them. This can't be intended. It must be a bug. Please help.
This sounds like you're used to the man command on Solaris and similar systems that use the `more` command as the pager. Under Linux, the `less` command is usually used as the pager, and the behaviour you quote is the standard (and documented) behaviour of the said command. The correct way to exit ANY session using the `less` command, including those created by `man` using `less` as its pager, is to type 'q' to quit less. If you prefer to use `more` as your pager, just set the environment variable MANPAGER to have 'more' as its value, and ensure it is exported. How you do that depends on what shell you prefer to use. ------- Email Received From "Jay H. Lang" <jay@tpmq-experts.com> 12/08/99 10:15 -------